Consumers often supplement their personal collections of media items (e.g., music, video, television programming, and audio books, among others) by purchasing additional media items, in a digital format, via a network, such as the World Wide Web. For example, online retailers (e.g., FYE.com), online media sources (e.g., Microsoft Corporation's MSN® Music service), and online subscription services (e.g., Napster® and RealNetwork's Rhapsody® digital music services) have libraries of more than a million media items available to the user remotely. In the majority of these transactions, there is a normal sequence of events that must occur before the media item a user seeks to purchase is available for use, such as by burning to a compact disc (CD), ripping to a portable music player, or persistently storing the media item for use apart from the network. For example, when purchasing a song online, a user must (a) locate the song of interest from a large quantity of available songs and online stores, (b) purchase the song, (c) download the song from the network to a local device (e.g., a personal computer), and (d) sync the downloaded song to the preferred final destination (e.g., a portable music player). In other words, the conventional process often involves multiple and sometimes tedious steps of locating, purchasing, and downloading the media as occurring both separately and before syncing the song to the preferred final destination.
Users tend to regard their collections of media items as coming from two, separate sources, namely a local library of media items that the user currently owns rights to and a store/subscription service of media items to which access may be obtained for payment. With conventional systems, the collection and manipulation of media items accessible from the two sources is accomplished with completely separate processes. For example, as user wishing to burn a CD with five songs from their local library and ten other songs from a store/subscription service, would first need to locate, purchase, and download each of the ten new songs from the store/subscription service. Once this process is complete, the user would then locate each of the five songs originally in the local library and the ten recent additions to the local library for burning the CD. This process for persistently storing the media items has several steps and requires ability in both online purchasing techniques and file management on a local device. For the knowledgeable user, this process is manageable, but requires several steps requiring human control and intervention. But many less-skilled users are simply not capable of performing these multiple tasks requiring knowledge and skill for multiple user interfaces and methods. A way to provide users with the ability to treat available media, whether owned or available for purchase, similarly in a single user interface would be useful. Moreover, a way to provide a means for initiating generation of a group of owned and for-purchase media items in response to a single action being performed by the user would be useful.
Moreover, users often wish to share their artistic preferences with others, such as by providing access to a user-generated playlist. A second user attempting to enjoy that playlist, however, may be unable to listen to each media item because he lacks the rights to access each of the media items. For example, the user may only be able to enjoy the media items accessible from the playlist already stored in his local library. Moreover, even if the second user has rights to the other media items (e.g., via a subscription service), he may be unable to readily access those media items via the playlist because the playlist is unable to provide the correct link to the streaming version of the media item on the subscription service. The second user may be required to translate the playlist to a form that cooperates with his media item access rights. In other words, the effective sharing of playlists can be complicated. Thus, a way to provide a universal playlist whereby any user could enjoy the playlist to the full extent of his access rights by providing appropriate links to potential sources for each of the media items, including partial samples of media items to which the user has no present access, would be useful.